How simple design helped Tinder dominate online dating (Mobile Summit)

We’re pleased to introduce Jonathan Badeen as one of our speakers at the sixth annual VentureBeat Mobile Summit on April 4-5.

The event focuses on strategies business leaders are using to drive significant mobile growth. Executives will discuss the best practices around acquiring, engaging and nurturing users.

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One of the basics, of course, is simple, compelling design. That’s what is driving the explosive growth of Tinder, the dating app, founded just more than three years ago — where it now dominates 18 Western nations as the top app for dating traffic. That’s a phenomenal accomplishment given the existence of many older, accomplished dating sites.

Tinder continues to emphasize design innovation, even as it finds ways to monetize its huge traffic. There’s an estimated $2.2 billion-plus online dating industry, according to various estimates.

Badeen is the guy who invented the “swipe right” action in the app, credited as the leading engagement force within Tinder’s app. At the Summit, Badeen will talk about how he sees design conventions and best practices in user experience developing over the next year.

Late last month, Tinder released a slew of new messaging features, including letting you easily add humorous GIFs to the messages you send to your prospective dates (by integrating a search feature with Giphy). In September, it added a “Super Like” feature, where users can now swipe up on a person’s picture to let them know they’re more interested in that one person than anyone else they’ve swiped on. Until then, Tinder has had two main functionalities: swipe right to initiate a match, and swipe left to indicate that you’re not interested.

Another reason why Tinder is instructive to other companies is because its core audience is the Millennial, the generation of young users many companies are hoping to attract. Half of Tinder’s users are aged 18-24, which makes up a big portion of the 19-34 Millennial cohort.

Tinder is independently run, but was incubated within the Match Group, and is still a property held by that $2.5 billion publicly traded company.

Other speakers at Mobile Summit include leading executives from Facebook, Pandora, GrubHub, Touch of Modern, and Freshdesk, which we’ll be announcing shortly. The event will take place at the scenic Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito, California.

We invite only 180 executives to the Summit (you can apply to attend here). The Summit is designed to be an intimate experience where executives exchange strategies around some of the hottest trends around mobile traction. The goal is to make the Summit the best insider event, and an independent one free from influence from specific vendors or platform owners. Leading vendors will be there, but we try to invite brands and other independent app owners to create the best mix possible. Working sessions go into depth on specific topic areas, and cocktail receptions make sure the networking juices flow.

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Topics include the following:

• User acquisition
• Designing the user experience
• Messaging and video
• Mobile marketing automation
• Targeting your marketing
• How to build your mobile marketing team
• How to orient entire organization around mobile
• M-commerce and online-offline convergence
• Nurturing existing users
• Harnessing data for mobile engagement
• Mobile advertising attribution
• Predicting and measuring

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